Niche Site Saturday: Week Two
It’s week two of fifty two on the niche site challenge.
The past couple of days I’ve been a bit ill (nothing to worry about – I just hate being unwell so my mood deteriorates rapidly) so this update won’t be me on top of my game.
Still, the project rolls on, and hopefully we’re going to start getting to the fun part soon.
Niche Site Stuff: What Have I Been Doing?
I planned out a lot of sales letters.
I’ve written one sales letter a day this week for a total of seven products covered across what will be four sites.
I have 54 sales letters planned – at least one for each of the fourteen sites I’m planning on launching in the near future.
I’ve probably spent less than an hour a day this week on the project outside of random thoughts; I’ve been writing for another project which has taken most of my time. (More on that in another article.)
What WILL I Be Doing?
One of my major sites has its domain name up for renewal this week. When I renew that, I’m planning on buying some domain names. So this week I’m going to name the sites and I’m going to spend money on them. If nothing else, that’ll inspire me to stop dragging my heels a little. Hopefully, this’ll mean that next week’s update is a lot more fun.
I keep everything straightforward when it comes to niche site design; I have a developer membership with a few different WordPress theme providers, so I just pick a theme that looks reasonable, load up the demo content and keep it simple. More on that next week.
On the writing front, I’m going to have to ramp up the sales letter writing at some point soon. Assuming I set up domains for my sites this week, I’ll want to have at least three or four sales letters per site, then a couple of basic how-to articles within the next couple of weeks so the sites don’t look empty.
The annoying thing will be keeping this sort of thing down to two hours a day – you can easily run over due to enthusiasm in the early stages. Of course, if other guys want to do that, then you probably should. I’m just sticking to the rules, and I also feel I should be making up for the lost time this week.
Random Thoughts Of The Week On Niche Sites: Target The Product
For more serious, topic-based thoughts on the niche site challenge, you might want to read the following two articles:
I wrote these earlier on in the week. The first is about planning and the second is answering a question from last week’s articles on niche sites.
An important point that we all came to was how to go about researching niche sites. To succeed, you want to think about researching the project in terms of the products you’re going to write about.
A niche site is a collection of product reviews that are relevant to a particular niche market. The example Justin and I used hypothetically was men’s fashion.
A few guys were getting confused because “Men’s fashion” keywords are very competitive.
That’s true, but “men’s fashion” is simply the name of the collection of posts. The posts are about products. So for instance, your site “Men’s fashion reviews” isn’t competing on that keyword term. It’s competing on “Armani Blazer Review.”
This seemed to get a lot of guys out of a rut and onto exciting things. I’m pretty happy about that – also, I’m glad that people are reading and joining in because it helps clarify stuff in my head.
As the challenge moves on, we’re all going to learn from each other. If anyone is sitting on the side lines, you should definitely join in.
Final Thoughts
I’ll leave it there with a call to action for everyone who is thinking about starting a little website: join in with us, read along, and leave some comments. The niche site challenge is all very informal and we’re all going to achieve a ton of cool stuff.
Next week, something more substantial will have happened. It’s going to be great.